“Did you ever test this thing on anyone? Or on yourself?”
“I don’t—don’t remember, I’m sorry—”
“Quit crying, all right? You’re okay, Fidds, you’re all right. Hey.” A hand cupping his face again. Stan shines a penlight in one eye, then the other. “Okay. Drugs are wearin’ off a little bit. Don’t cry out all that hydration, now.” After a few more gasping breaths, Fidds composes himself. Mostly. And then Stan says, “It just snaps onto the barrel like this?” and snaps the ray reversal bracket onto the barrel of the memory gun he’d had hidden…somewhere.
Fidds’s whole body locks up. God he needs the memory gun he wants it so bad and it’s right there if he can just take it but the reversal bracket is on and that’s bad, that’s very bad. “What’re you—don’t,” he whispers.
“What? Is it on wrong?”
“No, it’s n—I mean—it shouldn’t be on at all. It…it doesn’t work, anyway.” His voice cracks on the lie, not that it was very convincing to begin with. There’s a victorious glint in Stan’s eye that’s almost painfully familiar for a moment before he pulls a glass cartridge out of a pocket.
“No? So then if I load this bad boy up, it ain’t gonna do anything?” Fidds yelps as the cartridge pops into place with a clack.
“Tha—that’s—one of mine, Stan. You c…it ain’t gonna work on you anyway.” The victory in his eyes turns to pity before he presses the barrel to Fidds’s head, a sensation that’s both incredibly cathartic and terrifying. Fidds finds himself leaning into it, humiliating as it is, wrongas it is, even though it’s set to poison instead of heal.
“Please,” he chokes out, though he couldn’t say what he’s pleading for. Stan closes his eyes for a moment, turning his face away.
“God, Jesus Christ,” he whispers. “You are so fucked up.”
And then he pulls the trigger, and what should be a blessed release from the vortex chewing through his neurons instead widens the hole. And the hole. Oh, god. Contorts, widens, sucks up what’s left of him down and down and down until it’s inverting and his brain is reshuffling, an inside-out hole, nothing in its right place, and it’s too much too much he gored this out of his own skull for a reason this isn’t supposed to be here.